ABSTRACT
In accordance with Walter Benjamin's suggestion that true memories need to locate the precise spot in which they were first experienced, these three authors not only inventoried their discoveries but also indicated the exact places in which the past was now preserved. The desk and its utensils provided the rhetoric of invention with a formalized space for the development of memories. In La Roche's concept of the recollection of memories at her 'desk' there is thus a suggestion of a system of memory that almost presages Walter Benjamin's notion of the quotation. The series of 'desk' texts by renowned female authors was begun by Sophie von La Roche in 1799 and ended in 1839 with Caroline Pichler. The female authors' survey of their own 'text manufactory' thus turns an instrument developed for the observation of important historical events towards their own, personal histories.
